The Progressive and the Populist

In my piece “Obama’s Lost Year,” I tried to describe from the outside the ethos of the Obama White House: the way in which it makes decisions and governs, its rhetoric and temper, its emphases and blind spots. Obama’s Presidency is animated by what I call an “ideology of responsible process.” At its best, this ideology upholds a powerful example of good governance, intelligent policymaking, and honest discourse. It elevates nothing higher than Obama’s desire to improve America’s decaying political culture. At its most limited, it sees governance as a branch of mechanical engineering performed by pragmatic experts, and it doesn’t see that every political act means engaging, one way or another, in a larger philosophical debate.

In the piece I also profiled Tom Perriello, the freshman Democrat who represents Virginia’s mainly rural, mainly conservative Fifth District. Perriello is thirty-five, and Obama is the first politician in his lifetime to inspire him. Like Obama, he’s a graduate of an Ivy League college and law school. Like Obama, he has extensive experience in Africa and Asia. They’re both internationally-minded, reform-minded, practical-minded idealists. Perriello is as much an emblem of Obama’s election and agenda as Lyndon Johnson was of Roosevelt’s when L.B.J. was elected to Congress in 1936 as a twenty-eight-year-old New Dealer from Texas.

And yet the first-term congressman isn’t completely happy with the first-term President. Perriello criticized the Administration for its soft touch with Wall Street, its lack of imagination in economic policy, its failure to fight harder. The side of Obama that’s entirely comfortable with establishment economic figures such as Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers is at the farthest remove from Perriello’s point of view. This difference between two politicians with such similar backgrounds and political agendas has a historical significance, and it throws light on the President’s difficulty in his first year.

In political terminology that goes back more than a century, Obama is a Progressive, and Perriello is a Populist. Progressives came from the successful ranks of American society, they identified with the interests and aspirations of the educated and well-off, but their sense of civic responsibility was scandalized by the corruption of political machines and the evils of corporate capitalism. They were driven by moral conscience and pragmatic concern to crusade for a range of reforms, from the primary election to the income tax. Their impulse, individual and ethical in nature, was to cleanse and restore. Their model was the disinterested, public-spirited citizen who brought expert knowledge to solving social problems.

It was no accident that the Progressive heyday, from 1900 to 1914, was a prosperous time, for such periods allow the professional middle class to direct its attention to those below rather than above it. As Richard Hofstadter, who analyzed these movements better than any other historian, wrote in “The Age of Reform”: “One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged. In a large and striking measure the Progressive agitations turned the human sympathies of the people downward rather than upward in the social scale.”

Hofstadter identified in Progressives a distrust of large organizations, a strain of “persistent individualism.” They wanted to return American life to the supposedly free and fair competition among individuals and small producers that had been crushed during the Gilded Age by corrupt party bosses and business monopolies. A hundred years later, the scale of powerful institutions is taken as more or less a given by contemporary Progressives like Obama, who appointed an architect of the bank bailout as his treasury secretary. Their quarrel isn’t with bigness itself, but with the unfair advantages that political influence has conferred on corporations, insurance and drug companies, and banks against the consumer, the taxpayer, and the small businessman.

This is where distance between Obama and Tom Perriello begins to open. For Perriello is less a Progressive than a Populist. The Populists were agrarians, and when Perriello told an audience at a grant-giving ceremony in Martinsville, Virginia, that farm jobs could be the jobs of the future, he was sounding a very old chord in American discourse. In his language and sympathies, his frequent use of the word “elite,” his vilification of Wall Street bankers, Perriello is carrying the banner of the laid-off seamstress, the struggling truck-stop owner, the hard-pressed tobacco farmer. These were the constituents of the original Populists. They looked with anger upward rather than with sympathy downward. They didn’t come from the professional middle class, though some of their champions did, and they didn’t put their faith in the training and education of experts. If anything, expertise was suspect as a cover for the interests of the powerful. Hofstadter described the “dominant themes in Populist ideology” as “the idea of a golden age…the dualistic version of social struggles; the conspiracy theory of history; and the doctrine of the primacy of money.”

I heard these themes in my conversations with Dean Price and his colleagues at Red Birch truck stop, outside Martinsville. They combined a deeply Christian moral fervor with a sense of life as a great economic struggle between the large and the small. Their foe was big oil, working hand in hand with America’s foreign enemies. Patriotism and environmentalism, entrepreneurial capitalism and survivalism, a strain of nativism and a faith in innovation, were all mixed together in their world view. They were missionaries for renewable energy, with an apocalyptic view of America’s future. And they considered Perriello their best friend in politics.

Populists emerge during panics and depressions. And since we’re not living in a time of prosperity for most Americans, it’s not surprising that a Populist like Perriello seems to have his fingertips on the pulse of public feeling more surely than a Progressive like Obama. This might be why a Presidential candidate who seemed so attuned to the aspirations of Americans in 2008 became, as President in 2009, a bit tone-deaf to their anxieties and angers.